Episode 193: Using behavioural science to persuade your colleagues to do anything (including giving you a pay rise) – with Phill Agnew of Nudge

Episode 193: Using behavioural science to persuade your colleagues to do anything (including giving you a pay rise) - with Phill Agnew of Nudge

Jeremy Cline [00:00:00]:
Marketing is all about persuasion. Any kind of advertisement you see is trying to encourage you to do something. Now, how about using marketing principles at work? What persuasion techniques or strategies can you use with your work colleagues, maybe with your boss? That's what we're going to find out in this week's episode. I'm Jeremy Cline and this is Change Work Life. Hello and welcome to Change Work Life, the podcast where we're all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. I'm a career coach, and in each episode, my guests and I bring you tips, strategies, and stories to help you enjoy a more satisfying and fulfilling working life. Marketers are experts at using behavioural science techniques to try to influence our purchasing decisions. But can we use the same techniques at work to negotiate pay, handle a conflict, or persuade the boss to try out a new idea? To help us find out, I'm joined by a true marketing expert. Phill Agnew is the host of Nudge, the UK's number one marketing podcast where he shares consumer psychology tips and tricks to boost marketing strategies. Phill, welcome to Change Work Life.

Phill Agnew [00:01:23]:
Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Jeremy Cline [00:01:25]:
So, let's start by establishing a bit of credibility. How have you become such an expert in this area?

Phill Agnew [00:01:30]:
Yeah. This is a tough one, isn't it? Because nobody actually feels credible, do they? Nobody actually is going to come on and say, 'Yeah, here's why I'm so credible.' I almost feel like I should give a disclaimer and say, you know, don't actually trust too much of what I say because some of it might be proven to be false. But I guess my credibility comes from 10 years working in marketing, so always within tech companies, usually in product marketing roles, but more specifically in the last five years running the podcast Nudge, where I've had the pleasure of interviewing the world-leading experts in the world of psychology, marketing, and behavioural science, and learning about all the things they do. And in those last five years, Nudge has grown to be the number one marketing podcast in the UK, but the podcast goes well beyond marketing. And I guess part of my credibility comes from the fact that I don't just interview these experts. I try and actually test out their strategies in the real world for myself and then share the results on the podcast, whether they're good or bad. So, I wouldn't call myself an expert, but that's probably where some of my credibility comes from.

Jeremy Cline [00:02:33]:
That is one of the things I love about listening to Nudge, is when you describe those experiments. So, the two adverts on Reddit and seeing which one is most effective. So, you can see there is real-life application here.

Phill Agnew [00:02:46]:
Yeah. That's actually, I loved that one because it was so simple. All I did with that one was I said, for one of the adverts, learn the six wonderful things about marketing that I found out this year, and for the other advert, I said, I've spent 480 minutes listening to marketing experts, here are the six wonderful things I've learned this year. And one of those adverts did much better than the other. And if you keep listening, I think you'll probably learn why, because you'll probably end up talking about that nudge in a bit.

Jeremy Cline [00:03:12]:
Oh, that is a great hook. And I think that's a nudge in itself, isn't it? Encouraging people to carry on listening so they can find out what happens next.

Phill Agnew [00:03:20]:
Most people would call that a cliff-hanger, but it actually has a technical name, which is the curiosity gap, which is the idea that if you leave a gap in someone's knowledge, they'll really want to close that gap and discover what the answer is. So, that is a bit of what I was doing there.

Jeremy Cline [00:03:37]:
So, I'm conscious that there are going to be people here who hear me talk about behavioural science, and they go, 'Behavioural what? Why can you put it in? Just give us a brief introduction as to what it actually is.

Phill Agnew [00:03:47]:
Yeah. So, behavioural science is understanding people's behaviour. So, it's trying to figure out what makes people make the decisions that they end up making. What are the biases that might be triggering those decisions? What are the things that influence those decisions? And of course, behavioural science is a science. So, this isn't high-level theory. This isn't based on success stories. Everything within the realm of behavioural science should have been tested and published in a peer-reviewed journal. Now, that obviously means that some of the things that get published end up being proven to be false. That is science. But it's a really reliable field to rely on if you're a marketer or if you're in HR or if you're in other industries that care about the decisions people make, because you're basing your decisions, or you're basing your actions, if you follow behavioural science, not on gut instinct, not on how you might feel or what you think works, but on some reliable science, which hopefully should improve your work. So, in marketing, I use behavioural science to improve my marketing. That might be to write a better ad, like we said earlier, or it might be to improve pricing, or it might be to create a brand that's memorable. It might just be to figure out how people remember things. But obviously, you can also apply these findings to all sorts of life. You can apply them to your own personal life and build better habits. You can apply them in other parts of work, which I'm sure we'll talk about today. You can apply them in your relationships as well, with the conversations you might have with your partner. You might find better ways to have conversations based on some of the findings within this field. But at a very high level, behavioural science is the science of understanding how people make decisions and understanding their behaviour.

Jeremy Cline [00:05:25]:
And we've talked about nudges, and that's the name of your podcast. What is a nudge?

Phill Agnew [00:05:30]:
Yeah. I kind of maybe did myself a favour, but also harmed myself by calling the podcast Nudge, because, obviously, it's a good name, it references one of the best books in behavioural science, which is Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. And nudge is a general term that people use to describe tactics within behavioural science, things like nudge talk and other things like that. But if I'm being very specific, nudge is actually a specific tactic within behavioural science. So, it's a small intervention you can do, which won't change someone's choices. So, for example, say you walk into a canteen, and you look at all of the different food options that are available to you. You've got pizza, you've got pasta, you've got salad, and you've got sandwiches. A nudge, what it might do is, it might nudge you towards picking a different choice. So, a marketer might nudge you towards picking a higher value choice for them, but a health expert might nudge you towards picking the healthier option. So, this is a quite famous study from the Google canteen, so Google's offices, where they tested out different layouts in their canteen. And they found that if they put the salad at eye level when you walk in, more people pick it up. If you reduce the sides of the plates, people eat smaller portions. If you put the Coca-Cola and fizzy drinks behind opaque glass, fewer people pick them, and more people pick the water if that's behind clear glass. And these are all small nudges that health experts or behavioural practitioners can use to influence behaviour without limiting people's choices. So, that's the important thing there. When you walk into that canteen as a Google employee, you can still go get a sandwich, you can still go get a pizza, but you're being subtly nudged in the direction of a healthier choice.

Jeremy Cline [00:07:13]:
Where's the line between what you describe and manipulation?

Phill Agnew [00:07:17]:
Phil Barden, who's written a fantastic book called Decoded, explained this to me, I think, the best way. Because when you describe that, when I describe that, even talking to you there, it sounds a bit like manipulation, doesn't it? You're nudging somebody towards picking a salad. But what if they didn't want to pick a salad? Well, that's a whole another thing. Because if they're picking the salad, they obviously wanted to pick the salad. But your intervention has changed their decision. Phil Barden would say, that canteen has to be laid out in some way. It has to be. You can't lay that canteen out in a different style every single day to have it random every single day and to make sure that no nudge is influencing in some way. Either you're putting the pizza at eye level, or you're putting the salad at eye level. Either you're putting the fizzy drinks in the clear glass fridge or the opaque glass fridge. Everybody is nudged in one way or the other. What Phil Barden would say is, well, these practitioners, all they're doing is nudging people in a way that they would independently say is right for them. So, they would say, 'I would want to be healthier, so I don't mind being nudged in that direction.' And let's not get ahead of ourselves. These interventions, they're not going to change people's, people aren't going to go into that cafe and only eat salad. It's a subtle intervention, which will have a small impact, which for the people who it impacts, they'll probably be quite happy about. Nir Eyal in his book Hooked and Indistractable gives a really good example of where the line is for nudging. And it's, would you be happy if that behaviour, that behavioural change, say, picking a salad, would you be happy if that behavioural change happened to you or your partner? If I ended up eating a bit more salad because somebody put it in front of me, and let's face it, and I felt like it was my decision because you would in that scenario, that's going to make me happy. If I become addicted to a gambling app because they use variable rewards and dopamine hits, that's not going to make me happy. I wouldn't be happy if that happened to my partner, my mom, or my dad, or my sister. And it's not very hard to figure out where the line is when you apply that as your benchmark.

Jeremy Cline [00:09:16]:
I don't know much about gambling apps, but I kind of feel like they probably do use those variable rewards in order to get the dopamine hits.

Phill Agnew [00:09:24]:
Yeah. They do, and it's really sad. So, gambling apps, well, I also don't know too much about them, but I believe they're built on this principle called variable rewards, which was discovered by B. F. Skinner in some really interesting experiments with pigeons. So, what he did is he had a bunch of pigeons, he probably wouldn't be allowed today, this is a mid-20th century research, he had some pigeons, he kept them in a cage. Let's hope it's a nice, airy cage with good sunlight, but they were in a cage. And he had two variables. So, one where the pigeon could press a lever, and it would be fed food, and he just monitored their behaviour. The second variable was where the pigeon could press a lever, but the food came out at totally random intervals, totally variable interview intervals. So, the pigeon could press it 10 times, and only one droplet of food would come out. It could press it three times after that, and then three droplets would come out. And then, it could press it 20 more times, and nothing could happen. So, totally variable. He compared the two. The pigeon in the first scenario, where the pigeon could get food every time it pressed the lever, created really predictable normal behaviours. It over ate a bit at the start, but then calmed down, ate a pretty normal diet, only pressed the lever when it needed to. And, as far as the researchers could tell, had a quite anxiety-free, stress-free life as much as you can do in a cage. The other pigeon had a very, very different life. It became totally hooked on pressing that lever as much as it possibly could. It spent almost all of its waking hours pressing that lever, because it became addicted to this idea that this is a variable reward. If I press it as much as possible, maybe more will come out. I have no control over what's coming out, but I know if I press it, at some point, something will happen. And that variability got the pigeon hooked on pressing the lever. And when you know this, you realise that this is used in all sorts of bad ways by gambling apps. So, go to any casino game, and you'll notice that the rewards they dish out are variable. If you play it enough times, you will probably win, but you won't win enough to make your money back. That's the exact way that gambling apps work. But then you can also see it used, I think, in really smart ways. So, there's a cafe I went to a couple of months back that did the most genius way of getting people to leave a review. On the table of every cafe table, it had a little QR code, and it just said, 'Would you like to receive a surprise? All you have to do, scan this QR code, leave us a review, show us the review at the counter, and we'll give you your surprise.' What a fantastic way of using variable rewards. Because a lot of people do want to leave a positive review, but we don't feel a real urgency to do it. Knowing that we're going to get some surprise variable reward triggered me into action. I did it, and I went up, and I got a tiny piece of brownie, and it made my day. Another great example, there's an energy supplier in the UK called Octopus, a renewable energy supplier. They have an issue, which is how do we get people to leave meter readings? So, in UK, you have to check your meter for your electricity and your gas and give a reading once a month. Really important, or your biller will be totally wrong. So, how can we convince people, persuade people to leave a review every single month to keep coming back? They just use variable rewards. As soon as you leave your meter reading, you can get, it's copied straight from the casino, they pop up a roulette wheel with all these different prizes on, say, you know, six months free energy, a 1,000-pound holiday to Barbados, and then you press the wheel, and you might get a prize, or you might not. I've been with Octopus for, I think, three years. I've never won anything. So, they are actually not using this bias well enough because I'm not getting enough reward to keep me hooked. They should give me a 50p off every three months or something, and that would make my day. But that's the idea behind variable rewards. And, yeah, it's a fantastic nudge. And once you know it, you see it in all sorts of domains.

Jeremy Cline [00:13:19]:
I feel like I see this in social media as well. So, I'm old enough that I still use Facebook, which I think is probably not very fashionable these days. But if I press the back button to exit the app, first of all, it takes me back to the top of my feed, and then I'm going to press it again in order to exit. And as soon as it takes me back to the top of my feed, there's going to be a whole load of different stuff for me to look at. And so, it kind of raises my curiosity. It makes me think, well, let's just see if there's anything else, anything that I've missed.

Phill Agnew [00:13:46]:
Yeah. I find it quite sad. Because you're right, that is them using variable rewards to keep you on the app. But, again, if I ask myself, would I want my dad to be hooked on Facebook or my brother to be hooked on Facebook in the same way? I'd say no. And I think that's the issue with nudging, it can be so powerful that it's used in the wrong way. I'll give you an example of how it can be used in the right way just to appease listeners and make them think the world's not awful. There's a restaurant in London called Dishoom, a very, very popular Indian-Iranian restaurant. And from Monday to Thursday, they do something quite wonderful. If you eat at Dishoom between, basically over lunch, at the end of your meal, they'll bring out, I think it's a set of dice. And if you roll two sixes, you get your meal for free. Fantastic way of using variable rewards to just provide delight. Now, all they're really doing is offering, what would it be, 10%, 20% discount for people who eat at lunch on average. That's all they're doing. That's a very normal thing that an economist or a business might suggest and say, 'Oh, we'll just give a discount for those who come at lunch.' Most companies do this. But Dishoom understand the power of variable rewards, and they just apply it in a really delightful way, which gets people hooked on the service and keeps people coming back and has made me there for lunch just to try and win this fun little prize.

Jeremy Cline [00:15:08]:
I promised my listeners that we were going to look at this in the context of the workplace, so I really had better start with that. So, I asked you before this interview to come up with some nudges which could be used in specific workplace situations, like dealing with conflict, like asking for a pay rise, like trying to influence a work colleague. Yeah, what's the first one that you came up with?

Phill Agnew [00:15:31]:
Yeah. One of the first things you asked me was about negotiating a salary rise. I think we should start there because it's just something everybody will probably end up doing. And I'll start with the real classic advice that everybody probably listening to this podcast has heard of before, which is a lot of behavioural scientists will say, well, if you do anchoring, you'll get a better deal. So, anchoring is the idea that the initial piece of information you see or hear will anchor you, and the subsequent information that you think about will be anchored to that initial piece of information. So, there's a fabulous study in Western America, in a couple of bars, and this bar with a beer bar, and they served lots of different varieties of bottled beer. And the researchers looked at their menu, and they realised that the order was just random. And so, the researchers said, well, over an eight-week period, can we run an experiment? For the first four weeks, can we list the beer bottle prices on your menu from low to high? So, the lowest price beer at the top, highest price beer at the bottom. And then, for the following four weeks in the eight-week period, can we then list the beer prices from high to low? So, the highest price beer at the top, the lowest price at the bottom. Just simply reordering the menu, I think, increased the total order value for our customers at the bar by about 11%, something around that. I don't remember completely, but it definitely increased the amount of sales. And that's just anchoring. People look at the menu from top to bottom. They see the top price, which is a higher price, they're more likely to buy a higher price beer. Now, obviously, you can apply this in a negotiation. You can go, and you can say to your boss, maybe you're after a pay rise of 10%, you could then ask for a pay rise of 15% or 20% and anchor down from there. It's classic. I don't really like this advice because there's another bias, which I think is way more important, which is called reactance. This is an idea that as individuals, we really don't like it when our autonomy is threatened. So, another wonderful study with children at this famous nursery in, I think, California where they do lots of studies on children in a very ethical way, but in this study, they basically had a set of children come into a classroom and had loads of different toys for them to choose from, and children just pick toys randomly. And then, in another variant, they put one toy, which was not particularly popular before, behind a Perspex glass. So it made it impossible for the children to get to that toy. What happens? As soon as you make one toy unavailable, children really wanted that toy that they couldn't access. This is reactance. We don't like our autonomy being threatened. And I think bosses feel this when you start anchoring. If you go into a pay rise negotiation and do a ridiculous anchor, every boss is going to know what you're doing, and they're going to feel, 'I don't I don't like this. You're trying to influence me, and I really don't like that.' So, the way to get around reactance is to ensure that the party you're talking to, so your boss in that case, feels like the potential solution, which is a pay rise, is both their decision and your decision. And that requires a lot more than just simply anchoring. So, in addition to that, you're going to be wanting to be nudging your boss throughout the year to say, you know, is this something we're working towards? Can we work towards this together in lots of different meetings? It's something you want your boss to be advocating for as well. You want to say to your boss, 'You know, I'd really like for you to advocate for a bigger pay rise for me. Here's the reason why.' Maybe get them on board. Maybe get them trying to speak to their superiors about this. You want it to be their decision as well. And the other reason I don't like anchoring is because I've actually hardly, I've been in loads of pay rise reviews, I've never really wanted to use it. It's always made me feel really uncomfortable. I'm sure some of your listeners will feel the same way. Nobody wants to go into a pay rise negotiation and, be like, 'I want 50% more.' It just feels horrible. And the only time I've had a really significant pay rise was when I did something very, very different. This was about five years ago. Me and my partner, we decided we wanted to go travelling. We wanted to just quit our jobs, leave the country, go to South America and New Zealand. And so, I walked into a meeting with my boss, and I said, 'I'm going to quit because this is what I'm doing.' And something fascinating happened there, and I now know that it's due to loss aversion. So, we feel losses are twice as painful as equivalent gains. And my boss then felt, 'Oh, wow. Okay. We're going to lose Phill. What can we do?' And this is obviously combative reactance as well because he started to think of solutions. And a week later, he came back to me and said, 'Well, Phill, how about you come back after you're travelling, and we'll give you this new role and a pay rise as well.' And this pay, I wasn't on much pay at the time, I should say, but this pay rise was almost 2X. Like, it was crazy. And it's, of course, one example, you should never use one example. But it is an example of how actually the best pay rise I've had wasn't by using this anchoring tactic, but instead by leveraging a bit of loss aversion and then making sure that reactance wasn't coming in. So, my boss didn't feel like he was being manipulated. He felt like he was helping to come up with his own solution to this problem, and I think that's a really important one. So, if I was going to go into a pay rise negotiation today, I'd be thinking way more about reactance and making sure that my boss felt like the pay rise was in his or her best interests, rather than something like anchoring.

Jeremy Cline [00:20:53]:
And are there any additional techniques which people can use to support that? So, I like this idea of almost making it their idea, giving them the autonomy, making them the problem solvers. So, are there any other things that people can bring in to support that?

Phill Agnew [00:21:13]:
Yeah, there is some. So, there's consistency. So, this is the idea that we are more likely to take actions that feel consistent with our existing beliefs and values. So, one of the most famous studies on this is by Cialdini, a fantastic researcher out in Arizona in America. And he ran this really interesting study where he basically asked a bunch of Americans to stick a giant Drive Safely sign in their front yard. It's a horrible big sign, which said, 'Please drive safely in our neighbourhood.' You can imagine when he just asks people to do that outright, almost nobody agrees. Who would want to stick a sign up? He wasn't paying them. He wasn't doing anything. He just said, 'Oh, do you mind sticking this sign up?' Almost no one did it. But for a different group, he had visited them two weeks earlier, and he asked them, 'Would you be okay to stick this quite small sticker, a two-inch sticker, just in the window of your door at the entrance, which is telling people that you would like them to drive safely?' Almost everyone agrees to that. Really small commitment. Everyone says, 'Yeah, yeah, no problem. I'll stick that sticker on my door.' And when he went back to those people who had accepted the sticker and stuck the sticker up in their door and asked them to put a giant sign in their front yard saying to drive safely, the agreement rate was much, much higher. And actually, the total number of people who put up the sign was higher in that group than the original group who were just asked. So, this is commitment. If somebody agrees or commits to a small thing or something like that, they are more likely to keep doing that. So, the most basic way you can apply this with your boss is the three yeses principle. You say to them something along the lines of, 'Do you think I'm doing a good job? Yeah. Yeah. Of course, you are. Yeah. You really are. What are some of the projects that you've really liked? Oh, I really liked it when you did this project. So, with all of that in mind, do you think I deserve a pay rise?' Well, they're saying yes. They're sort of committing to that value, to that belief. They're more likely to actually give you a pay rise. I think that's a bit too small of an intervention. I think you're crazy if you think you can do that in half an hour. I think the way you could leverage the commitment principle and the consistency principle is just by having this conversation way more regularly. So, if you want a pay rise in six months' time, you should be speaking about it six months in advance saying, 'I really want to work with you, boss, towards getting this pay rise. I want you to tell me the things I need to achieve in order to get there.' And then, following up every month, here's how I'm doing with this tactic, here's how I'm doing with this campaign that you asked me to work on. And then, three months before, you say, 'We agreed. Do you remember when we agreed? When you said if I did these three things, you'd give me a pay rise, well, I've done them now.' You're almost certain to get a pay rise in that scenario. That's a much smarter way of applying that. So, that's the tactic I would use. I think it's a bigger intervention that people maybe want, but it's one that actually really works.

Jeremy Cline [00:24:12]:
I'm curious to know what you think about that idea of getting yes, yes, and yes. Because I'm pretty sure that it was Chris Voss in his book, and I know you've interviewed him, he said that it doesn't work, and that it's actually much more effective getting noes.

Phill Agnew [00:24:27]:
He did say that. Yeah. He said that what you need to do or what can be really useful in a negotiation is figuring out what people will say no to. So, yeah, it was an interesting principle, and I think he's basically, like me, quite against this idea, imagine you're being talked to by a salesperson who gets you on the phone, and they say to you, 'Do you use broadband? Yes. Do you think having fast broadband is good? Yes. Okay. Do you want to upgrade to this new?' But it's like, everybody knows, everybody will just feel this reactance immediately and think, 'Oh, just leave me alone. I don't want to talk about this.' And I think Chris feels the same way. So, maybe a salesperson would do a better job if they found a no really early on. Like, 'Oh, would you be up for paying 250 pounds extra for the ultimate fast broadband?' Obviously, they'll get a no. And then they say, 'Oh, okay. Okay. Well, now from the no, let's ask for a much smaller ask.' So, that would be the door-in-the-face technique for those who are following on and care deeply about these biases. So, sometimes I think pushing for a yes doesn't work because it's too small of an intervention. I think that that's actually one of the main things I would say about nudges and behavioural science in general. Be wary when somebody claims they can make a huge impact in someone's behaviour with a really small intervention. So, be really wary when someone says, 'Oh, if you just follow this five-second technique, maybe it's a power pose, hold your body in this position for 60 seconds before you go into your pay rise, and you'll be so confident and so flooded with testosterone and willingness to gamble that you'll just get a pay rise.' Be really wary of that because that just goes against conventional knowledge. It's almost impossible to do something for just 60 seconds that has a dramatic impact. Obviously, small interventions can help, and there were going to be loads of examples where they are reputable, proven and repeated. The way I come at it from is, well, really the things that are really going to help you are understanding psychology and behavioural science, but applying them across a much longer period and applying them in a much bigger intervention. Like that example I just shared about the pay rise, it's much better if you work towards it for six months and make it a joint effort than if you just try and hold a power pose for 60 seconds before your interview.

Jeremy Cline [00:26:44]:
So, we've talked about pay rises. What's the next situation we can talk about?

Phill Agnew [00:26:49]:
One of the things you've asked me about beforehand, Jeremy, was this idea of having a difficult conversation with a colleague. I really like this one because I think this is something I've struggled with. I hate having difficult conversations. I've turned down managerial roles because it just fills me, maybe it's not anxiety, just apathy. I just don't want to do it. I really don't like having these conversations. But I've read a lot of leading psychologists' work on communication, and I think since reading that, it becomes quite clear that this is easier than I thought, and it should be something that I should be able to do. So, Vanessa Bohns is somebody who influenced me a lot. She wrote a brilliant book, which I think it's called You Have More Influence Than You Think. And she has run a number of studies where she gets her students to just ask strangers for things they wouldn't believe the stranger would agree to. So, the most famous one of her studies is, she asked people in a library, just students working in a library, 'Would you vandalize this book?' Now, if I ask you to do that, Jeremy, just go into your local library and ask people to do that, your prediction would be everybody in there would tell you to get lost. Do not, don't vandalize library books. She found that 64% of students agreed. They just agreed to the request. And her finding there isn't that students are criminal radicals who just want to vandalize knowledge. Her finding actually, when she looks across, because she's done multiple studies on this, is that people just feel inclined to say yes. We all predict that conversations will be really difficult. They're actually much easier, and people are far more likely to want to help us than we think. So, that's the first finding there. Having this conversation with a difficult partner is probably going to be easier than you think, and it's probably going to be easier to get to a solution. The next finding, I've just interviewed Charles Duhigg, who's the author of Power of Habit and his new book, Supercommunicators, he's done a lot of studies on figuring out what supercommunicators do and how they communicate. And one of the most interesting parts of his book is this idea that asking questions is not enough. So, previously, I would have gone into that conversation with a difficult partner and just thought, I just need to understand their point of view. I need to ask enough questions to empathize with them, and then we can find a solution. That was my worldview. I was very influenced by Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. He says, the solution to a good communication, to a good conversation is just to ask the other person questions. And that's what I would do. But I've never really had much success. And it wasn't until I spoke to Charles Duhigg that I figured out why. Because he says, asking questions on their own is not enough. If you just ask shallow questions, and you don't follow up, all you'll do is further alienate your conversation partner and make you seem even more distant and less interested. He suggests doing something different, which is asking deep questions. So, asking deep questions with this colleague that you're having a difficult conversation with, and then looping back for understanding. And that means saying, 'Okay. I understand what you mean. Here's an example where I felt the same way. I think you mean this. Is that right?' And so, I actually tested this recently, and this will be coming out on an upcoming episode of Nudge. I recruited four strangers, two of which I asked shallow questions, and I didn't loop back for understanding. So, I'd ask them stuff like, where do you live? Okay. What do you do for a living? What do you like about your job? These shallow questions. And then when they would give me an answer, so for example, I said, 'Are you married?', one person said, 'I was, but I'm not', I wouldn't loop back. So, I would just move on to the next question. And when you do that, it does feel quite rude. But it is kind of normal to the way most people have a conversation. You know, we're half interested. We know we should ask questions. We just ask these shallow questions, then we move on. We don't loop back. We don't talk about our own experiences after they answer. Whereas with this other group, so the two other strangers in my little mini experiment, I asked deep questions, and I looped back. So, rather than saying, 'Where do you live?', I said, 'What's the best thing about where you live?' Rather than saying, 'Where did you go to school?', I would say something like, 'What advice would you give to yourself when you were at school?' And these deep questions allow people to express themselves in better ways. And once they did, I would then loop back. So, if somebody would say to me, 'Oh, the thing I love about my town is that it's really calming.' And I said, 'Oh, what makes it calming?' This all sounds pretty basic. But the result is quite tremendous. The two who had the deep question set rated the conversation better. They rated the questions better compared to the other two in the shallow set. More importantly, the two in the deep set said the questions and conversation allowed them to connect and open up. Whereas the two in the shallow conversation set said the questions didn't allow them to open up, and it didn't allow us to connect. And so, this is my advice for people who are trying to have that difficult conversation. Do not go into it with a list of questions that you think need answering and a feeling that you don't have to share your own point of view. So, let's say you're having a conversation with somebody who, let's say it's a subordinate of yours, and you're the boss, and they're saying you're micromanaging. Don't go into that as the boss and think, okay, all I need to do is understand where I'm micromanaging, and then that's enough. So, don't go in and just say, 'Okay, so where am I micromanaging? Okay. So, how often do I do that? When was the last time you noticed that?' That's not enough. Ask deeper questions to say, 'How do my actions actually make you feel?' Try and get to the emotion there. So, when this last happened, how did that affect your day? Get to the emotion. And then loop back. Say something like, 'You know what? I really understand where you're coming from because when I was early on in my career, I had this really annoying boss who was a micromanager. And I always said to myself, I never wanted to be like them, and it is really sad to hear that. And I definitely don't want us to feel that way. Let's try and find a solution where I can make sure that the quality of your work is at the level that we need, but also that you don't feel that way because I've felt that way before, and I really don't want to feel that way.' And that will allow you to have a much better conversation. If you just follow those principles of asking deep questions and looping back for understanding, you'll be able to better understand the person, they'll be able to better understand you, and you'll probably be able to get to a much better solution with this conflict that you might be having.

Jeremy Cline [00:33:11]:
And you've framed this in the context of having difficult conversations, but you could see this being used in any situation really where you're having conversations. The one that's coming up to my mind in particular is something like networking conversations. So, if business development is part of your brief, and you're expected to go to drinks, evenings, and dinners and that kind of thing, then you can use exactly these techniques. Rather than just saying, 'Oh, what do you do?', you can ask questions which are maybe a bit surprising, like where did you go to school, or where did you grow up and that kind of thing, and then explore that topic even further to get that deeper connection with the person you're talking to.

Phill Agnew [00:33:56]:
Yeah. Charles Duhigg writes and told me that you really want to be trying to get the individual you're talking to to talk about their own emotions and worldview rather than just tangible things. What did you think of the food is a really bad question. Maybe saying, 'Oh, you know, is there a location..." Yeah, oh, no, this is a bad one. What did you think of the food is a really bad question, but maybe saying, 'What's your favourite meal that your partner cooks for you?' is a much better one because it gets to a more emotional space. Charles actually says, when I said I was running my experiment, he said, the question you should try and ask people is, when did you last cry? So, oh my god, I can't, even in my experiment, I was like, this is too much. I couldn't ask that question. But he says he does it with strangers on stage, and the strangers were always shocked by how wonderful they find that question to answer, because they think it'd be horrible. He's always shocked by how well people answer that question, how well people open up. And he says it's one of these questions that is really, really powerful because it gets to emotions very quickly. Now I'm not telling people to go to a networking event tonight and ask everybody, 'When did you last cry?' But if you can go in that direction rather than the direction of how long have you been in your job, what do you do, what do you get paid, and what are you working on at the moment, you'll probably end up having a better conversation and have a better networking event.

Jeremy Cline [00:35:17]:
I like the idea of eliciting some kind of emotion. I had a previous guest who said, 'Ask people what their first job was.' Not like their first professional job, but their first job like working the checkouts at the supermarket or delivering pizzas or something like that, because that is probably going to give rise to all manner of emotions because it would have been something you did when you were like 16, 17 and finding your way, and suddenly, dealing with adults. So, I'd imagine it'll bring up a whole lot of stuff.

Phill Agnew [00:35:46]:
Yeah. That's a lovely one. And then, what's the moment when you realized that job wasn't for you? What was the thing that caused you to end up in the job you are now? You know, these are all much better than just saying, 'Oh, where do you work at the moment?' I really like that one, what's your first job, I'm going to steal that.

Jeremy Cline [00:36:01]:
I think we've got time for one more. So, give us your final, the best one of this conversation. No pressure.

Phill Agnew [00:36:09]:
No. The best one. We talked about trying to persuade, well, one of the things you asked me about was trying to persuade your boss to take up your idea. We spoke about it before this call. I think that's an interesting one. So, trying to persuade a boss that your idea is good is something probably everybody listening to this has had to face at some period of time. And there are some quick nudges you could use, as nudges like the authority bias. So, you could go to your boss's boss and tell them about the idea. And if they like it, you could then tell your boss that boss's boss really liked it. They would be more inclined. You could use social proof. So, that's the idea that if lots of people are doing a particular action, or lots of people like something, other people will follow that action. So, McFlurry sold 55% more in McDonald's when the menu said this is our most popular dessert. Classic example of social proof. A dentist appointment said 95% of our dentist appointments arrive on time, and that dramatically increased the amount of people who actually arrived on time. We follow the actions of others. So, if you're trying to persuade your boss, you could say, for example, 'Oh, I've spoken to the finance team, and all of them are really on board with this idea. Or I've actually spoken to a lot of the marketing team, and they've come up with a number of different ideas in addition that we could use to supplement this, sort of getting that social proof. But I think both of those are one level beyond a tactic that I think is crucial to so many parts of behavioural science and is shaping the way I view decision-making in general, which is, actually, the real thing you need to do to persuade your boss is to put in effort. So, as humans, we really, really understand and value effort. When we know somebody is making an effort, we are more likely to perceive their idea to be good, to agree with their requests, whatever it might be. One of the most wonderful studies about this comes from a HBR 2011 article, which was set up in a restaurant. It's so simple, this study. I love it. So, what they found was that, this was a restaurant which had transparent glass between the seats, the dining area, and the kitchen where the chefs work. And on alternate weeks, they would make that glass transparent, and on other weeks, they would cover it over. They wanted to see what effect seeing the chefs at work had on the diners and what effect seeing the customers eat the food had on the chefs. And the effect was very, very interesting. Turns out, the diners are more likely to enjoy the meal when they can see the chefs working on it. They are more likely to leave a higher tip and to want to pay more and to go for higher value items when they can see the work behind the food. More interestingly though, the chefs are more likely to cook better food when they can see the customers. When they can see people coming into the store, coming into the restaurant, and making the effort to get there, they're more likely to repay that effort. And I think this is fundamental. It's this idea that when we see the effort behind something, we're more likely to value something. So, right at the start of the show, I told you about two Reddit adverts. One, where I said, 'I've spent 480 minutes this year speaking to marketing experts, here's what I've learned', and another where I said, 'Learn the six best marketing tactics I've heard over the past year.' One of those ads, the first one, showcases the effort I've put in, 480 minutes speaking to experts, that's quite a long time. The other one just talks about the benefit that the customer would get. A lot of marketers would tell you the second one would work better. It did not. The first one got 45% higher click-through rate, and that is because I'm showcasing effort. So, let's go back to the boss's example. If you want the boss to agree with your project, one of the best things you can do is just showcase your effort and actually put in that effort as well. So, an idea will be more likely to be accepted if you go to your boss and you say, 'I've spent six hours doing market research. Here's a report I've got. I've spoken to finance about it, and here's what they think. I chatted with our partners, and two of them would already be on board for an idea like this. And, you know, it's not a big deal, but I worked late one evening putting together this presentation, so it's ready to go.' That'd be almost impossible. The boss would have to really dislike the idea not to go for that. Whereas if you go to the boss and just say, 'Oh, I've got an idea. What do you think?' It's far less likely to work. And also, if you put in that effort, your boss is not going to be more likely to accept your idea. It's going to change the whole boss's perception of you. Suddenly, you become this individual who makes a lot of effort. And believe me, individuals who make a lot of effort within a company will be more likely to get a promotion, pay rise, whatever it might be. And so, that would be the way I do it. Now you could counter that and say, an economist could counter this and say, 'Phill, this is a really bad use of your time. What you should be doing is suggesting 10 different ideas and waiting till the boss agrees with one of them and then working on that. That would ensure that you never have to work on a project which is denied.' I actually just really, I just disagree with this. I think that does work. I think you would end up only, you know, you could really practically find the things you only work on that your boss agrees with. But I don't think that changes your boss's perception in the same way as the earlier example I gave. Your boss's perception of you there is somebody who is just searching, a bit uncertain, not much of a self-starter, searching for something to do, not particularly autonomous, not particularly able to work independently. I don't think this is a good example as actually making a bit of effort, creating something, and bringing that to your boss. Anyway, long-winded way of saying that we learned a lot from those chefs in the kitchen. Not only did they create better meals, customers were willing to pay more, and that's all when we can see the effort behind something. So, my advice would be to showcase your effort.

Jeremy Cline [00:42:08]:
I'm curious about the interplay between that and what you were saying earlier about reactance. So, the risk of going away, working the late night to produce the paper, going and talking to finance staff and other people and saying these people are all on board, and you're presenting it to the boss, and they're starting to feel like they've been presented with a fait accompli rather than having it on autonomy.

Phill Agnew [00:42:34]:
It's a good point. And this is where behavioural science is interesting because you might follow one principle to its extreme and find that you're against another principle. So, what I would do there is I would follow the advice of some fantastic researchers who research reactance. And they ran a study at a bus stop where they asked passengers waiting for the bus for some change to take the bus. Not many passengers agreed. When you just ask, 'Can I have some change for the bus?', most people say, 'Oh, sorry? I don't have any change on me. Sorry. Can't help you out.' But they then tweaked the experiment. So, for the second group, they said, 'Do you have any change for the bus? But you're free to refuse.' Bit of a junky word to say, bit of a clunky word to say, sorry, but they added it on. They just said, 'But you're free to refuse.' And all that did is it gave the fellow passenger all of the autonomy. It just said to them, 'I'm not expecting this. You're totally free to refuse me.' And that one line just changed the passenger's behaviour. They were far more likely to give the change to help the other passenger take the bus. And that's exactly what I would do with the boss. I think you could trigger reactance badly if you go in, and you're basically saying, 'I'm doing this. You have no autonomy over me. This is a project that will happen because, look, it's happening. I'm doing it.' I think if you go in with the idea and you say, 'You're totally free to refuse this, I totally understand that this might not be right for us. I've worked on this outside of the additional work, I haven't been replacing the work I've been doing here. I've obviously been doing the work that you've asked me to, but I really feel strongly about it. I really feel it might work.' And then, you say something like this, 'Before I go any further, I just wanted to double-check with you. I wanted to get your view on this because it's really important for me to understand that you support this project as well.' And that, just that one little extra bit to the presentation, totally changes the reactance problem because suddenly, the boss feels like their autonomy isn't questioned. Suddenly, they feel that they're part of this project, and they'll be far more likely to agree. So, great point to reference the reactance thing there. There's quite an easy solution to it as well.

Jeremy Cline [00:44:54]:
Phill, you've dropped an almighty number of knowledge bombs and techniques and tips and strategies that people can use. If you wanted the listener to take away one thing to hold in their minds about using behavioural science in the workplace, what would that be?

Phill Agnew [00:45:13]:
Sell your effort. So, everybody is working hard. Everybody is trying their best in the workplace to create good relationships. Everybody's doing these things. The mistake I make, and I think a lot of other people make, is they don't work hard enough to sell it, to showcase it. So, an example would be, let's just say you want to get on with your peers in the office. You might really care about, it might keep you up at night, but just making a bit of effort, baking some brownies and bringing them in for people on a Monday morning, that tiny bit of effort has a huge impact. The chefs work better when they can see the customers. The customers work better when they can see the chefs. People work harder when we can see the effort. People are more likely to click on my ad when I showcase the effort that I put into my work. What I love about this principle is I think when you use this principle, when you start to understand that a lot of effort equals a lot of rewards, all of the other biases I've talked about are suddenly amplified. So, social proof becomes more impressive when there's effort behind it. So, rather than just saying McFlurry's is the most popular item, you could say something like, out of every dessert in the US, McFlurry's is eaten more than anything else, than vanilla ice cream or something. Not a great example, but everything else can be amplified. Authority bias can be amplified when effort comes into it, consistently can be amplified when effort comes into it. Anchoring can be amplified when effort comes into it. So, really, everybody's working hard. Don't let that work go to waste. Sell it. Showcase it. It'll influence the decisions of others for something which is right because you're working hard on something, and it deserves recognition.

Jeremy Cline [00:46:52]:
So, be very un-British and don't hide your light under a bushel.

Phill Agnew [00:46:57]:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Jeremy Cline [00:47:00]:
You've already referenced a number of different books and papers. Are there any others which you'd suggest? If someone else wants to look into this topic more, start here.

Phill Agnew [00:47:10]:
One I would, well, two I'd always recommend just to understand the world of behavioural science would be Influence by Robert Cialdini. It's a fantastic book. There's another which I don't recommend very often, but maybe good for an audience that's not marketing or business specific, which is The Art of Thinking Clearly. The author goes through a number of different biases and then showcases examples and studies of how they affect people in the real world, in workplace setting as well. That author had a bit of trouble with some sort of, something with another author, which went wrong, but I still think the book is good. So, read it with that in mind. And then if you want one, a book I've read quite recently that I really enjoyed was Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg. We spoke about it earlier. I think if you're thinking about workplace dynamics, if you're thinking about how to get along with your peers, if you're thinking about having better conversations, that's a really fantastic book for just learning how to communicate a bit better. And if you can communicate a bit better, it'll help you out in the workplace. So, those would be the three, Influence, The Art of Thinking Clearly, and Supercommunicators.

Jeremy Cline [00:48:14]:
And where should people go to get more of you?

Phill Agnew [00:48:17]:
Yes. I run Nudge, the podcast. If you search for it, you'll see an orange-ish logo with Nudge and then my name underneath, which is Phill Agnew. That's my podcast. Just go and listen to that. Pick an episode that looks fun, and start there.

Jeremy Cline [00:48:34]:
Links in the show notes as always. Phill, I asked you at the start of this episode to give us some credibility. I didn't need to during the course of the interview. You've given us plenty of that, so thank you so much for coming on.

Phill Agnew [00:48:46]:
Thank you so much for having me. Cheers.

Jeremy Cline [00:51:33]:
Okay. Hope you enjoyed that interview with Phill Agnew, host of the Nudge podcast. I'm so pleased to have got Phill on. I've literally been listening to his podcast pretty much since it started, and it's well, well worth a listen. So, delighted he could come on and share his knowledge. Phill had loads of techniques that you could try there, and it was interesting that he said that his number one was this idea of showing your effort. This idea if you demonstrate to someone the amount of work you've put into it, then they're more likely to be sold by your idea. Phill in his podcast regularly says how many hours of research it has taken him to put together an episode. You can do the same thing with your boss by telling him or her how long it has taken you to put a particular report together and then present the evidence. The other idea which really struck me, and this won't come as a surprise to anyone who has listened regularly to the podcast, is the idea of becoming a supercommunicator and not just asking questions but asking deep questions and looping back to the answers that people give you. Phill said that one of the keys to communicating deeply with people was to get them to express their emotions and their worldview. Get these, and you'll have a much more enriching conversation with someone, which could end up being much more productive. Phill cited lots resources, and I've tried to put as many of them as I can in the show notes for this episode which you'll find at changeworklife.com/193, that's changeworklife.com/193. Now, I tend to record these episodes quite far in advance, and so it completely passed me by that the episode a few weeks ago marked five years of the podcast. I launched Change Work Life in October 2019. We're now in November 2024, and so I have been going for five years. And I find that quite surprising actually. I had no real idea where the podcast was going to take me when I started. I certainly didn't anticipate just how relevant it was going to become a few months after I started it when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and people started to question just what work meant for them. But it really has been a pleasure and a privilege to put out shows initially every week, now every two weeks for the past five years And I wouldn't have done it if I didn't have listeners. So, thank you whether you've been listening for a long time or whether you're new to the show. I don't know who most of you are because you just can't get that information. But every listener does mean an awful lot to me. So, thank you. Thank you for investing your time in listening to the content that I'm putting out. I've said before that I want to put out the content which is most valuable for you. And the only way I'm going to know that is if you tell me. So, if you have any ideas for, crikey, the next five years, we'll see, anyway, if you have ideas for the next few episodes, then do get in touch. You can message me using the contact form on my website, changeworklife.com/contact, that's changeworklife.com/contact. Do drop me a line. Let me know what else would you like me to discuss. In the meantime, the episode coming up in two weeks' time is for you if you've ever thought about working for a start-up. How do start-ups differ from large corporates? How is the working environment different? What expectations should you have? What expectations might they have of you? It's a really interesting conversation so make sure that you are subscribed to the podcast if you're not already, and I can't wait to see you then. Cheers. Bye.